What's the truth behind the story of the Nativity? ask Life on Mars writer Tony Jordan

The Nativity is a story that, despite conflicting opinions, continues to occupy a special place in our collective consciousness

We all embellish, forget names and dates, focus on the parts of a story that interest us most

The last time I remember being moved by the iconic story of the birth of Christ was seven years ago. I was sitting in a room filled with other anxious parents in a school assembly hall. Through misty eyes I watched as Lily, the youngest of my six children, played the most beguiling donkey in dramatic history.

So four years ago, when I was approached by the BBC to write the story of the Nativity for the small screen, I had to have a hard think. I’m hardly a biblical scholar, after all.

True, I had travelled back in time with my drama series Life on Mars. But with the exception of a paternal fondness for that Nativity donkey, I was more than a little unprepared.

I suspect my initial view was the one shared by most of us. I didn’t really have an opinion about whether the Nativity was completely true or not.

On the surface, I felt it was a rather lovely Christmassy story with baby Jesus in a manger and I liked it. But I’d never thought beyond that.Mary and Joseph, for instance. My experience of them was the Nativity set I put up in our house every year. But theirs is a story that, despite conflicting opinions, continues to occupy a special place in our collective consciousness.

In a mission to bring the story to life, I began by locating the seldom-troubled Jordan-family Bible in a long-forgotten drawer, and settled down to fill in the gaps in my knowledge.

Unhelpfully, I quickly discovered that the Gospels of Mark and John don’t mention the Nativity at all, while Luke and Matthew barely give it a page between them – and even those scant words are contradictory.

When I went in search of the historian’s views of the Nativity, I found they were conflicted, making it clear they didn’t think the story was historically accurate. They were keen to point me in the direction of a list of fundamental facts that proved this.

They argued that King Herod had supposedly died four years before the birth of Jesus Christ, and that the crucial journey to Bethlehem – brought about by Joseph’s desire to take part in the census of Quirinius – couldn’t have happened, because Quirinius wasn’t appointed as governor of Syria until some years later.

Then, finally, there were those biblical scholars who tried to convince me that the Nativity story was essentially a patchwork of different stories culled from other religions, all manipulated to make Christ the Messiah.

So, after almost a year of searching for the truth behind this story, I was left with a narrative that apparently originated in only two contradicting Gospels. And that, according to the academic advice, didn’t even make sense historically, and therefore probably didn’t happen.

Oh, and just in case I managed to
find a way through all this and write something of any factual
substance, it was a story where nearly everyone in the world already
knew the characters, the sequence of events and the ending. Not exactly
a dream job for a screenwriter.

Mary, Joseph, the baby Jesus and the three 'wise men' in Jordan's The Nativity

Then,
one cold November evening as I trawled through my notes, I came across
a page I’d written after reading a research paper. It dealt with how
the Gospels were written at least 100 years after the death of Jesus,
and possibly 200 years later in some cases. Before that, there was
simply an oral tradition of storytelling, where news was given and
gathered around a campfire.

It
was as if a light had come on – it was my Road to Damascus moment.
Clearly, just as in the game of Chinese whispers, the chances of every
date and every detail being factually correct after being passed on by
word of mouth for 100 years or so were pretty remote. My own personal
knowledge of how we humans retain, and deliver, our most precious tales
set me free.

It meant
that suddenly the inconsistencies in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew
didn’t matter; indeed, to my mind they gave the story more credence.
They weren’t evidence of a conspiratorial manipulation of facts, as I’d
been led to believe. If the facts had been manipulated, then surely the
two accounts would have matched perfectly. These were simply two
narratives reported as they’d been told to the authors, after a century
or more of passing the story down the line.

Overnight, this also destroyed the
historians’ argument that because the timing relating to Herod and
Quirinius is inaccurate, the story must be too. For me, this was
scientifically applied theory, which didn’t take into account human
nature.

We all embellish, forget names and dates, focus on the parts of a story that interest us most. The only part sure to remain is the heart of the story, the reason for telling it in the first place.

In short, it was then that I decided to present the Nativity in the traditional manner. I would retell it using the constants, the basic building blocks of the narrative as it would have been told by simple men around the campfires 2,000 years ago.

One of the most fascinating details for me was the way we’ve always viewed the Three Wise Men. These three pivotal figures weren’t kings, I discovered, but almost certainly members of an ancient priesthood known as Magi. It’s interesting that although the Magi are universally represented as a trio in the form of Melchior, Balthasar and Gaspar, this is probably due to the fact that there were three gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh. In fact they were most likely religious scholars who studied the stars; there’s a reference in the Old Testament to the prophet Balaam, who foresaw that one day ‘a star shall come out of Jacob and a sceptre will rise out of Israel’.

Balaam prophesied this a long time before the event – he was also credited by some as being part of the Magi, or at least being part of the formation of the people who became known as the Magi. Once I understood this, I began to realise why they might have been driven to travel 1,000 miles to Bethlehem in search of a star.

My research into the Magi also made it clear that they were far too important to travel in such a small number. Three Magi would almost certainly have a large caravan of guards accompanying them, with up to 100 horses and camels.

Still, it was only the iconic three who were privileged enough to be present at the birth.

One of the most fascinating details for me was the way we've always viewed the Three Wise Men. These three pivotal figures weren't kings, but almost certainly members of an ancient priesthood known as Magi

As with most parts of the Nativity story, I was concluding that even the inconsistencies added to the story rather than detracted from it. The fact that Joseph returned to Bethlehem for the census because he was born there always made me wonder, why didn’t he have any family to stay with?

Rather than use this as a reason to dismiss the whole story as the academics had done, I concluded that possibly he would have visited his family first, but they would have turned him away because of the scandal brought about by Mary’s pregnancy – there are countries in the world where this would still hold true today.

Likewise, the historical King Herod was diseased, insecure in his position and quite clearly paranoid, so when three Magi arrived and told him that they’d come to worship the new King of the Jews, why didn’t he have them followed?

Surely it would have been much easier than subsequently killing every newborn child in Bethlehem. So for me, the Magi didn’t visit Herod; instead, when they crossed his border and he sent an envoy to ask them their business, they were suspicious enough not to tell this envoy the truth about their journey.

The criterion I held on to when taking any decision in my own version of this story was how I perceived it might have been told around a campfire. Would a shepherd take the time to mention that Herod sent an envoy to challenge the Magi, or would they simply say it was Herod himself? Those shepherds also wouldn’t know who or what the Magi were, so how would they describe them? Wise men? Kings?

From a point of utter bewilderment only a year before, I’d arrived at a way to tell the story, and tell it as honestly as I could and in a way I could believe: I would not allow a single inconsistent aspect to derail the narrative.

Watching any story that I’ve written come to life is a magical thing. Watching this one has literally been awe-inspiring. I remember sitting on the set, one star-filled night on location in Morocco, watching as Mary was visited by an elated Angel Gabriel. As he knelt in the dust in front of her, taking her hands and telling her that the light of the world was inside her, I realised my eyes were moist.

This had been a long journey – indeed, something of a pilgrimage; one that had taken me from disbelief of the virgin birth at worst, disinterest at best, to a place where I can now say that I truly believe it happened. Not exactly as I’ve portrayed it perhaps – this is merely my own version. But it is a story that has a beauty and a truth about it that’s hard to ignore.

On the final day of shooting, I walked past the donkey that had carried Mary through most of the filming. Her name was Clara, and something in her eyes told me this wasn’t her first Nativity. I stopped to stroke her and my thoughts immediately went back in time to Lily, on the stage of her primary school, wearing a donkey mask and looking adoringly at a small plastic doll in a cardboard manger.

A tiny stage, full of youthful innocence and acceptance with an equally adoring audience and a feeling of love in the room that was tangible. It’s nice to believe. It feels right.

And although as I write this I can hear the wail of the academics and the sneering historians, I almost feel like a child again, and Christmas suddenly has a new wonder.